Chapter Text
This is something between a review, a rant, and a dissertation, presented as a semi-organised stream of consciousness, spiced up with some sarcasm, a touch of rancour, and, of course, salt. I have no formal journalistic background, nor do I have much experience as an essayist, but I do have a keyboard, some command of the English language, and opinions, and, in this case, very strong and negative ones, which I’m going to share with you here, as a die-hard fan of the How to Train Your Dragon franchise.
Before that, however, if you somehow liked this movie, I want to assure you that at least I will not be a hypocrite with you. I’m not going to say that I’m not trying to take your enjoyment of this movie away from you. I am. And while I don’t much care about succeeding, for I don’t want to remove fans from the fandom, I’m nonetheless going to try my best, as I value intellectual integrity above the numbers and statistics of my little HTTYD fanfiction. Still, if I lose any readers over this, so be it.
With this review I won’t of course be telling you to hate this movie, as I have no authority over your feelings. Instead, I’ll be doing something more sensible, by recalling a quote that I used to attribute to Roger Ebert, though my sources seem to have disappeared: “The friend can tell you if you will like the movie. The critic can give you his best advice about whether you should.” In this instance, I’ll try to be the critic, and argue my case for why you should dislike this piece of art, especially if you are a fan of the franchise.
It should go without saying, but since I’ll be linking to this on Tumblr (I know, I like living on the edge), I’ll also remind you that, if you are an obsessed fan of the franchise, and if you prefer living in denial, or if you feel that having your opinion swayed by my review might upset you, you can always skip reading it. In other words, as today’s internet youth might probably put it: “don’t like, don’t read”. I suspect not many people will read this anyway, so I’m sure my voice will be quite easy to ignore within the fandom.
If instead you are up for the challenge (i.e. if you are a real Viking™), you are most welcome to read this, and even to reply as scathingly as you like. I have a thick skin, and my feelings are all bottled up anyway, so you don’t have to worry about hurting them.
However, and I can’t stress this enough, please do take your time to read everything carefully if you intend to argue or start a conversation. It has taken me about two months to put this together, so, unless they are comments of agreement (of which I anticipate none), I expect any of your arguments, even if terse, to be backed by at least a few hours of work and effort.
If your replies are mere jibes or remarks about yours truly (even if delivered politely), if they are lacking in proper grammar, if they are non sequiturs, unsupported dismissals of my arguments, or if I have already addressed the points you bring forth in some other part of the review, I will exercise my right to ignore them. In the latter case, if I feel generous, I may reply by pointing you to the paragraph where I’ve already addressed that specific point. That’s why there will be an index.
Oh, and if I hear anyone utter the phrases “it’s just a kids’ movie” or “it’s just fantasy”, they’ll be immediately considered out of the argument. I’ll still gladly answer any non-rhetorical questions of course, as soon as I have the time.
To reiterate: I expect of anyone who wants to put forward an argument to have read this review very carefully, possibly twice. If I get the feeling that you did not, I may not be inclined to acknowledge your messages. I know how arguments often work on the internet, so I’ll be very strict about this. I understand it’s a long review, but nobody forces you to read it, or to reply to it. (If you somehow know me personally, I don’t mind a more open approach to this conversation, yet still strictly over beer, wine, or whisky. After all, the word symposium literally means “gathering over drinks”, and that is the format I favour for all my debates.)
I shall however apologise for this review’s preposterous length. I know brevity is said to be the soul of wit, but in this case I’m willing to sacrifice my image as a witty person for the sake of completeness and accuracy. I want there to be no misunderstandings regarding what I say, and I want to cover every single flaw of the movie thoroughly and with care. If you still find any mistakes in what I said or in my grammar, feel free to point it out to me. I’m thankful for any suggestions, and I’ll gladly correct any errors.
Now, regarding my methodology: First of all, you’ll find an index of my arguments with a very particular division of the topics I’ll be covering. Whenever assessing a movie, I try to be as objective as I can by use of a special system I devised over the years, which I believe to be the fairest to the medium of film-making:
Considering a maximum rating of 10 points, I divide my reviews into three main objective aspects, one for each of the major artistic endeavors involved in movie-making.
- Writable arts: stuff that can be somehow put to writing or narration and enjoyed by active reasoning, like stories, plots, scripts, poetry, statements and so on.
- Audible arts: stuff that can be perceived and enjoyed only through your ears.
- Visible arts: stuff that can be perceived and enjoyed only through your eyes.
I see every movie as a coming together of these three art forms, and the quality of a movie to me stands in the balanced synergy of all three aspects, without one being more important than the other.
(Yes, to me the story is just as important as the soundtrack or the visuals. If the story was for some reason more important, it would detract from the huge efforts made by the other artists involved in the creation of what is by far the most complex art form ever invented. If the story was more important, then reading the books from which movies are made would always grant a better experience, and while that is often the case, it is not so by design, and properly-written movies should, and often do surpass their books, for they have the addition of two further art forms with which to engage the audience’s emotions. It’s a rare thing, I’ll admit it, but, to return to the topic at hand, I think the first How to Train Your Dragon movie did just that, or I wouldn’t be here discussing its sequels.)
Thus, in my rating system, each of the three aspects I mentioned is worth 3 points maximum for a total of 9 out of 10, and this is where I try to be as objective as possible.
Finally, there is one more aspect where I try to relegate all my inevitable subjectivity, namely Personal Enjoyment, worth plus or minus 1 point, including possible rounding of decimals. Default rounding is always downwards (8.9 is still not 9), unless there is something in a movie I personally found exceptional and worthy of extra praise. This section’s rating will most often reflect the other sections’ ratings, but it’s not redundant, as there are cases in which this rating may be dissonant from the more objective assessments. For example, if I happen to enjoy a technically bad movie, or hate a technically excellent movie. It’s rare, but it happens.
The four total aspects, and thus the four macro-sections of this review, can be quickly summarised by the acronym S.A.V.E:
- S for STORY (Plot, Characters, Pacing, Dialogue, etc.): [+3 points max]
- A for AUDIO (Music, Sound effects, Voice Acting, etc.): [+3 points max]
- V for VISUALS (Photography, Acting, Editing, Design, Animation, Style, etc.): [+3 points max]
- E for ENJOYMENT (this is self-explanatory): [+or-1 point and rounding]
If you want to have a rough idea of the results produced by this rating system you may be interested to know that my average IMDB rating is 4,97 for 1088 titles. The distribution of my ratings also closely resembles a gaussian (“bell”) curve with the aforementioned mean value, which is not far from median of the spectrum (5.5), thus suggesting that if I’m being at all unfair across the board, it cannot be by much. Also, the variance of the distribution is about 3.1, meaning that with this rating system I still end up assigning most of the votes of the spectrum, and I don’t just stick to 5/10 ratings.
I think it would give you better context if I began with the fourth aspect of the review (Enjoyment) before moving to the meat of my complaints with the Story aspect, and finally to my thoughts on Audio and Visuals.
By the way, if you are only interested in my specific motivations for the provocative title of this review, you can skip directly to ASPECT 1 of 4, part 13, paragraphs: d), e), and f), though I do not recommend it.
SPOILER ALERT
I’ll be nitpicking all the issues I had with this movie, so expect this to be a long read, with plenty of spoilers for almost every single frame of all three movies of the franchise.
ADDENDUM
Whilst in the process of finishing this review, it was brought to my attention, through a conversation that sprouted from a comment to one of my works, that there are indeed others who, like me, found it necessary to criticise this movie by writing their own reviews. I had actually not expected that, nor (rather stupidly) had I spent any time looking for other people’s arguments, as I had plenty of my own to unload onto the page. Besides, criticism of this movie was (and still is) rather hard to come by.
Now, however, it behooves me to acknowledge that there have actually been others who have already addressed some of the points I bring up in this review. While I did not take any inspiration from their reviews, for mine was almost already finished when I came across theirs, I still think it proper to mention the names of the two authors whose reviews I happened upon before publishing mine. The first is IronGut, who wrote How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, A Failure to Inspire, the second is 10Blue10, who wrote The Hidden World - A Critique. Both reviews can be found on archiveofourown.org.
Some of my points regarding the plot are already addressed by their reviews, though often with a different angle, so I do recommend reading theirs as well. For my part, I can claim that this review will be longer, a bit more structured, certainly more scathing, and likely more controversial than theirs. If you prefer a lighter introduction to criticism of this movie, I suggest you head directly to their reviews. Both are very well written.
The two authors also set up a Discord group for people who have taken a more critical approach to this movie. By their permission, the following link is an invite for anyone who is interested in joining the group: discord.gg/vQxJMcg
For that eye-opening conversation, which showed me that indeed there are other critics of this movie, I have IronGut to thank. I shall hence dedicate this review to all the angry and disappointed fans of the franchise, who do apparently exist. I also thank IronGut for kindly beta-reading this review as well.